f good family (his ancestor, Armigell, was reputed
to have landed in America before Gilbert or Raleigh), he had inherited
his manor of Bellasis, or Belsize, from one Sir Esme Wade, ambassador
from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Spain in the delicate matter of
Mendoza, and afterwards counsellor to James I, and Lieutenant of the
Tower. This Esme was a man of dark devices. It was he who negotiated
with Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it was he who wormed out of Cobham the
evidence against the great Raleigh. He became rich, and his sister (the
widow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the family
of the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased by the
union of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade was a
Lord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his diary [July
17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised to the peerage
in 1667 by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton, and married for
his second wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope, second Earl of
Chesterfield. Allied to this powerful house, the family tree of Wotton
Wade grew and flourished.

In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,
and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemed
to have run itself out.

The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the
adventurer, with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the
Tower. No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took
to dice, drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last
century. He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the
notorious "bloods" of the day.

Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a
fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade," he says, "is
reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night to that vulgarest
of all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say the fool is not
yet nineteen." From a pigeon Armigell Wade became a hawk, and at thirty
years of age, having lost together with his estates all chance of
winning the one woman who might have saved him--his cousin Ellinor--he
became that most unhappy of all beings, a well-born blackleg. When he
was told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the rich shipbuilder,
Sir Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with fair-haired gentle
Ellinor, he swore, with fierce knitting of his black brows, that no
law of man nor Heaven should fu